Distophia

In what is possibly the most unlikely partnership since Anna Nicole Smith said “I do” to J. Howard Marshall II, Birmingham math rockers Distophia and Staines’ self-appointed voice of all things chav, Hard-Fi are spending three long weeks on the road together. Side by side. Where one goes, the other will follow. Strange but true…

Looking around the room at the Hackett tops and TK Maxx carrier bags, it doesn’t look good for the Midlands’ answer to - albeit with louder distortion pedals – Pavement. They’re hardly the sort of band you’d expect to see warming up an audience who’d be more at home surrounded by cans of Stella and a copy of Nuts magazine, and when Pete Dixon’s guitar lets out an almighty screech of deafening feedback before they’ve even played a note, the safest option is to hide behind one of the bouncers in case it all kicks off. Which thankfully, it doesn’t, because with the passing of time – about 20 minutes to be exact – Distophia actually manage to pull off the impossible and win over the majority of the crowd. Well, these songs are great to punch the air to with that bottle of Beck’s, right Gaz?

So it’s onto the main event. It wouldn’t be an overstatement to say that Hard-Fi have had the sort of year mere mortals like you and me could only dream of. Proper rags to riches stuff, as only a year ago no one would touch ex-Contempo singer Richard Archer’s new band with a bargepole. Three hit singles and a platinum selling album later, and the fervour with which the crowd devours Archer and his accomplices before a note is even played can only be described as pure devotion. Odd really, because for all the workmanlike, down to earth panache of their tunes, Hard-Fi are not, and never will be, a band you could imagine providing the same life saving affirmation as say, The Smiths or ‘The Holy Bible’ era Manics.

To be fair though, they also seem to do themselves a certain disservice by way of their association with that nasty four letter word beginning with the letter “C”, as Hard-Fi are certainly much better than just a.n.other throwaway pop band to drink cheap cider and take mum’s slimming pills too.

‘Middle Eastern Holiday’ is the most realistic anti-Bush rant yet, without the American idiocy synonyms pushing it into parody park like other certain internationally feted artists, while ‘Tied Up Too Tight’ is the song both Mick Jones (with Big Audio Dynamite) and Joe Strummer (with The Mescaleros) spent their post-Clash years trying to create.

So when you have an arsenal of good tunes, why the need to drop a cover version – and hardly a definitive one at that - of The White Stripes’ ‘Seven Nation Army’ after only three songs, which seems to go on for the length of one side of an album? Unfortunately, about eight or nine songs and one encore later, it becomes apparent why. Hard-Fi clearly don’t have the depth of material just yet to justify their upgraded headline status, as in just 6 weeks time they'll be headlining the cavernous (by the Rescue Rooms’ standards) Rock City – a show which has already sold out.